RELATIONSHIPS between Churches and historically enslaved peoples need to be healed in a first step towards reparations, which must include financial compensation, a delegation of Jamaican Christians has said on a visit to the UK.
Members of the Church Reparation Action Forum (CRAF) in Jamaica met representatives of the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, the Evangelical Alliance, the Quakers, the New Testament Church of God, and the National Church Leaders Forum, to discuss how Churches should repair relations with the people of Jamaica and other countries whose people were enslaved.
The Revd Dr Collin Cowan, from the United Church in Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, said: “Financial reparations are essential when we think of the damage that has been in done in terms of mental health, in terms of equality of education, of psychological damage, of poverty — all a result of colonial enslavement and racism.
“However, we have argued that at the heart of it is broken relationships. We have robbed each other of the image of God. It is not possible to talk about financial reparations unless we talk about the healing of history and broken relationships, and we affirm we are all created in God’s image. If these relationships are developed and healed, then financial reparations will follow.”
The delegation welcomed the Church Commissioners’ £100-million investment fund for communities affected by historic slavery (News, 10 January). The Quakers and the United Reformed Church have also designated funds, and have apologised for their links to slavery.
Mr Cowan said, however: “These funds are quite small in terms of the dislocation and damage that has happened, and we do not want to be too quick to accept the funds and miss the greater cause. When we get a public apology which is an acknowledgement that a wrong has been done, that will bring us into a better relationship.”
The Archbishop of Canterbury has previously apologised for the Church’s “shameful past” and links to slavery.
To critics of the Church of England’s investment fund, Mr Cowan said: “Our argument is that we are part of a hostile history that has left us in different places: some dispossessed, some privileged. How might we say we are going to create a better place for our children and grandchildren, and live better lives as human beings?”
Pastor Bruce Fletcher, who chairs CRAF, said that the £20-million compensation after the abolition of slavery to those who had had owned slaves had been paid off by the UK government only a few years ago; so this was not just a matter of history.
In the week of the 75th anniversary of the arrival of Windrush (Features, 16 June), he said that Churches in the UK still needed to address their treatment of the Windrush generation.
“We need to get to a point where there is a clear sense of equality, and in the context of Windrush it is evident that the Church was not practising equality,” he said.
Mr Cowan said that his own Church, the United Church in Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, was identifying ways in which it might itself make reparations for its own past complicity in the slave trade, as many churches were enriched by the trade and helped to quell slave uprisings.
CRAF advises the government of Jamaica, and will urge it also to put the healing of relationships at the heart of its own conversations with the UK about historic slavery.